What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone—not just select high-potentials—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and professional growth?
That’s the radical premise explored in An Everyone Culture (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016) by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, in which the authors show how deliberately developmental organizations (DDOs) are different from other businesses.
When the authors refer to DDOs as having an “everyone culture,” they don’t simply mean that everyone (and not only a chosen few) gets developmental support. They also mean that the culture supports and challenges employees wherever they are in their developmental journey.
The book examines areas where DDOs are particularly adept in their quest to build a sustained development culture, including these five qualities:
“An optimally developmental work culture not only does an especially good job of holding on, letting go, or sticking around, but also does an especially good job of all three—and it does this not only for people who occupy one particular place in development but also for those who occupy various positions in the entire trajectory of adult development, ” the authors write.
Kegan is the Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Lahey is also a professor in Harvard’s School of Education and founding principal of Minds at Work, a leadership-learning professional services firm.
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